Guitarists, your Days are Numbered 590
spackbace writes "Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have created a mechanical guitar playing robot, named the Crazy J. The guitar player is composed of two mechanical systems that interact to play a range of 29 musical notes. A plucking mechanism with six independently controlled picks is mounted over the body of the guitar and a fingering mechanism with an array of 23 fingertips is mounted over the first four frets of the fingerboard."
fear not..... (Score:5, Interesting)
Never underestimate the human ear and its ability to pick (pun intended) the poser. I've heard of the obsolescence by technology of so many things musical that never really got there.
One I fondly remember was a report on the CBS Evening News, granted, it was a long time ago, but the point is valid today... They played a video clip of an orchestra playing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and asked, "What's wrong with this picture?". I remember thinking, aside from the really crappy quality of sound, hard to say. Their punchline? The music was from a synthesizer, NOT the orchestra (yawn).
This experience (for me at least) is not unique. I had to toss my "white noise" generator I used to help sleep at night... over a period of time my ears picked up the "random" pattern and it actually became an irritant, not a mask of other ambient noise.
I also own a Yamaha high-end keyboard (full 88 key, acceleration keys, 128 voice polyphonic), and it's main piano "voice" was digitally sampled from a Steinway. It sounds wonderful, but I could pick the Yamaha out of a bunch of real pianos from a mile away. The pitch was always too perfect, the decay was always to predictable, etc.
Have you ever listened to a musical recording and found the laid down "generated rhythm" track so perfect it was annoying? I have.
Technology can do some interesting things in music, none of them human. If technology is used create an instrument played by a human, that's one thing... Technology to play an instrument is quite another, and in my opinion will never approach the real thing. If you've listened a lot to classical, it's pretty easy to pick out Stern, or Perlman as the violinist on the same piece. Likewise it's pretty easy to recognize Vladimir on piano.
Didn't You Go To Expo 88 in Brisbane, Australia? (Score:1, Interesting)
This news is almost two decades old, and this is supposed to be a technology forum. *embaressed to be here*
Re:Days are numbered? (Score:2, Interesting)
L.E.M.U.R. (Score:3, Interesting)
Wrong one. I knew the robot. (Score:5, Interesting)
True story: While working for The Dixie Dregs and the Steve Morse Band sometime 1991-92, I did a gig at The Ranch Bowl in Omaha, Nebraska.
This venue had, as well as an "old-man bar", a rock radio station, a small rock club, and a beach volleyball court, a bowling alley on the premises.
After the gig was over we (band & crew) were invited to bowl a few games on the house. Sometime around 1:30 AM, Steve Morse (accomplished commercial pilot, virtuoso musician, genius composer, and guitar god) picked up a bowling bowl, announced that he had not bowled previously, and then attempted his first bowl.
I think he knocked over a couple of pins. As he stood there motionless, I could just see him running back the instant replay in his head.
His next turn... he threw a strike.
His next turn... another strike. All night long, strike, strike, strike.
Steve Morse is the original guitar-playing robot.
And he can kick your ass at anything. Period.
'Swelp me gawd.
Re:fear not..... (Score:5, Interesting)
In effect you try to create something similar to brownian motion to the tone quality and musical execution. IE instead of set values/lengths of tones rigidly adhered to and perfection of timing you create a set of varibles that execute randomly across an acceptable range forming a HUGE range of possible combinations.
It still won't replace live musicians but it would likely go a long way to eliminating that fake perfection feel synthesized music always has.
in refference to this particular invention I found the decision to go with plucking to be an odd decision. It seems to me some kind of back and forth mechanisim utilizing an actual guitar pick would have resulted in a sound much more equivalent with something a live player would produce. Instead they wound up with what amounts to a 6 string harpsichord. A neat technical problem for applied engineering education though.
Re:Days are numbered? (Score:3, Interesting)
No, that's just what we tell the computers what to play just like that's what we tell beginning students what to play. The only reason music students don't sound like that is because they don't yet have control of their intruments.
Fast forward a few years and suddenly the student could play that methodically, if they wanted, but by this point in time they've learned to interpret what the composer meant by the notes. The rough outline the the notes record can be filled in by common experience.
Computers are great at doing exactly what we tell them to do. The problem is, us humans can rarely express exactly what we want. Perhaps if only we could better describe the human condition...
Or, from a different POV (Score:5, Interesting)
This isn't new..? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think it was made by one of the Japanese tech companies. It could play some pretty complex music, including stuff humans can't play, due to it not being limited by finger length - so it could play a bass line and melody simultaneously on the same guitar (or multiple bass lines, etc).
This was like 5+ years ago. A quick google yields nothing, but I remember it well.
Re:Days are numbered? (Score:3, Interesting)
You could do simple Baroque pretty easy, sounded OK, like a Casio watch I used to have. I tried to do ragtime and boy did it suck. I hacked around to get syncopation just right and I ran out of memory.
Fast forward to the Atari ST, the ones with the MIDI ports built in, and that was a lot better but still lifeless. I captured myself playing 1 part of a duet on my MIDI keyboard, then played it back so I could play the second part along and it still seemed lifeless (at least to me).
You just can't replace live, intrepreted music.
analog compression of music information (Score:3, Interesting)
mechanical forces which apply to the strings, when a guitarist plays it
and feed that back into Crazy J. This would allow a preservation of a
play in a very compressed way.
I heard once a public lecture of Negroponte from the MIT media lab,
where he invited the audience to think about the fact that recording
all the forces onto piano keys would allow storage or transmission of
music information in an interesting way. The play of an artist could so
be preserved efficiently. The compression effort is very expensive and
needs a lot of hardware, but the compression rate is enormous. Unlike
formats like midi, it contains all the musical interpretation
of the artist.
Having stored the play in a mechanical way could have applications. One
could try how the "pianist" or "guitarist " would play on an other
instrument, one could correct mistakes or analyze, what features make
a good pianist or guitarist. Further applications are that one could
play musical pieces on real pianos or guitars which humans are
physically incapable to play, for example by pure limitation of the
number of fingers or speed limits of the fingers.
Re:Or, from a different POV (Score:1, Interesting)
http://et.stok.co.uk/articles/128-19.html [stok.co.uk]
Re:Days are numbered? (Score:3, Interesting)